Keeping Me Up Nights

Thanks for all your thoughtful comments on yesterday’s seat belt post. I’m really glad it inspired such discussion.

Last night Dad, Ginny, Sam, and Jamie traveled to Chatham (about 90 minutes away) for a volleyball scrimmage, and Mom and I plowed through some Chinese food and decided to spend another evening competing in the Couch Olympics.

Seriously, you guys, the Couch Olympics are strenuous, and they’re killing us. See, Mom and I have to get up early for work (she gets up earlier than I do, even) and on a normal night she’s usually sacked out by ten, and I shoot for eleven.

Well, this week we’ve both stayed up past midnight every night, because we have to be good Americans and watch the Olympics, and also because NBC is sneaky and puts the good stuff in chunks at the end so you’ll watch it all, and we are sheep so we do exactly that.

So we’ve been staying up way too late, and we’ve both been dead on our feet all week long. I was just talking to Mom on the phone and she said she was afraid she was going to fall asleep right on her desk, and then she said it too: “The Olympics are killing me!”

It’s so true. I feel that I need to come in late every day next week, because I need my sleep in order to maintain my Olympian schedule.

Also, around ten-thirty last night when Mom and I were sprawled out like slugs, overloaded with MSG, I said, “I hope my pin connector gets here soon, because I want to play my damn Nintendo.”

“Oh,” she replied, “there’s an envelope addressed to you on top of the printer. I forgot.”

So I raced in there and ripped open the envelope and got out my new pin connector, and I grabbed the screwdriver and the Nintendo and some newspaper and proceeded to take it apart again. I put the new connector on, screwed all the screws back in (except for those two I forgot about), screwed the case back on, and picked up the system.

And it rattled.

So then I took apart the Nintendo again, shook out all the screws I’d set in the holes and forgot to tighten down, put them in, tightened them, continued to omit those last two screws (long story, but they aren’t necessary) and put the case back on.

I raced over to the dedicated Nintendo TV, hooked all the cables back up, put in Super Mario Brothers, held my breath, and pressed the power button.

And screamed my damn head off like a crazy Clay Aiken fangirl when the Super Mario Brothers/Duck Hunt menu filled the screen.

I talked Mom into playing 2-player with me, even though she was reluctant because I used to kick her ass at Nintendo back in the 80s. So she made some comment about how she’d never get a turn, because I’d never die, right as I ran Small Mario directly into the first Goomba thing and got killed.

Oops.

It’s taking a little while to get the hang of it again, but we got into Super Mario Brothers 3 last night and played it until it was (again) well past time for me to be in bed.

It’s the best thing that’s happened all week.